The following links and information will help you to find existing evidence more easily.

NHS Evidence

Local Library Services

Other Sources of Evidence

NHS Evidence

NHS Evidence, allows everyone working in health and social care to access a wide range of health information with a fast, free and easy to use search to help users search for the information they want.  Information includes evidence, guidance and government policy. UHL Library Service have created a helpful user guide

NHS staff who have an Athens account can also get free access to paid for journals. You may need to register for an Athens account

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Local Library Services

Your local Library Services can provide resources and training on how to find evidence.

• The UHL Library Service currently offers free training to UHL and LPT staff within Leicestershire. There are several sessions taking place over the coming months aimed at providing you with the knowledge and skills to find the most relevant information quickly and easily for your everyday practice.
• Northamptonshire Provider Services Libraries offer a broad range of library services across the Trusts in Northamptonshire, freely available to all NHS staff within the county. Training includes using evidence based health websites to find high quality information, and literature searching using databases among others.
• Kettering General Hospital  NHS Foundation Trust, Knowledge & Library Service supports evidence-base practice through information literacy/critical appraisal training, literature searching, full-text journals, textbooks, inter-library loans and current awareness etc.  Membership is welcomed from all East Midlands NHS staff.
• The Clinical Sciences Library provides services to the staff and students of Leicester Medical School. It houses the medicine, health and social care collections of the University.

A guide is available that summarises all library services available to NHS staff across Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Rutland, providing details of what services are available.

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NHS Leicester city have produced a brief introductory guide to ‘Finding the Evidence’ to help researchers, healthcare professionals and commissioners who want to know how to find evidence to support decisions.

The National Institute for Health Research, (NIHR) includes The Portfolio Database –a repository for information on all portfolio research projects in England; it currently contains over 2,500 studies that can be accessed for public searching.

The Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD) is part of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and is a department of the University of York. They undertake systematic reviews evaluating the research evidence on health and public health questions of national and international importance. They produce the following databases which are used extensively by health professionals, policy makers and researchers around the world.

• DARE contains 15,000 abstracts of systematic reviews including over 6,000 quality assessed reviews and details of all Cochrane reviews and protocols.
• NHS EED contains 24,000 abstracts of health economics papers including over 7,000 quality assessed economic evaluations.
• DARE and NHS EED include details of abstracts in the process of being written and these can be 'fast-tracked' on request. Priority is given to UK NHS
• HTA brings together details of over 8,000 completed and ongoing health technology assessments from around the world.

The Cochrane Collaboration, produce Cochrane Reviews - systematic reviews of primary research in human health care and health policy. They investigate the effects of interventions for prevention, treatment and rehabilitation. They also assess the accuracy of a diagnostic test for a given condition in a specific patient group and setting. These can be accessed through the Cochrane Library.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) provides guidance on the effectiveness of treatments and medical procedures.  Recommendations made regarding the management of diseases or clinical conditions are based on a review of clinical and cost effectiveness evidence.  NICE also sets quality standards and manages a national database to improve people's health and prevent and treat ill health.

Association of Public Health Observatories represents a network of 12 public health observatories (PHOs). They produce information, data and intelligence on people's health and health care for practitioners, policy makers and the wider community. Their expertise lies in turning information and data into meaningful health intelligence.

East Midlands Quality Observatory (EMQO) provides insight into the quality of services across the East Midlands for the public and the local NHS, supporting organisations in delivering high quality services. Quality is defined across three domains - clinical effectiveness, patient safety and patient experience. Delivering high quality care in new ways, more quickly, cheaply, and fairly are expected changes across all domains, but are not separable domains of quality. 

Databases
The Centre for Reviews and Dissemination provides an excellent resource list of major and specialist bibliographic databases. The following databases are a good starting point for searching for literature for health and social sciences.  Most should be available via Ovid, using NHS Athens username and password.  Your library should be able to help you with this.

• CINAHL                               Nursing and Allied Health disciplines database
• BNI                                       British Nursing Index (provided by Ovid and available via the RCN e-library)
• PsycINFO                            Psychology database (also available through Ovid)
• HMIC                                    Health Management Information Consortium (available through Ovid)
• AMED                                   Allied and Complementary Medicine database (available through Ovid)
• Pedro                                   Physiotherapy database  
• ASSIA                                   Applied Social Sciences Knowledge summaries (available through ProQuest)
• EMBASE                              Biomedical literature – special focus on Drugs (e.g. pharmacology, pharmaceutics and toxicology)
• MEDLINE                            Biomedical literature - United States National Library of Medicine. Available via PubMed
• Health Business Elite      Health care administration database

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